DIY Mapping Goes Mainstream

Last summer, we wrote about a DIY aerial mapmaking kit from The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science that enables anyone with $95, a camera, and some helium to become a citizen cartographer. The project empowers people to document events (oil spills, Occupy protests) that official mapmakers might overlook. But this kind of grassroots aerial surveying (distinct from other forms of grassroots mapping) also has another benefit: It produces bird's-eye images that are sharper and more beautiful than airplanes and satellites can capture.

To that end, a cache of more than 100 maps from the Public Lab project have now been incorporated into Google Earth itself, signaling some nice recognition of rogue mappers (and their DIY data) by the biggest commercial behemoth in the field. If you happen to stumble in your Google Earth wanders across a patch of surprisingly high-resolution landscape, you may be looking at a Public Lab contribution. Or, if you want to go looking for these images with a little less happenstance, you can also find all of them indexed in this Google Earth KML file.

About the Author

Emily Badger is a former staff writer at CityLab. Her work has previously appeared in Pacific Standard, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.